Owner J.T. Smith launched The Game Crafter as an original game producer in 2001. Since 2009, however, TGC has provided print-on-demand services to publish independent board and card games with high-quality parts, pieces and boxes. Home-baked ideas that were once slave to the engineering whimsy of an individual designer now could be mass produced, made to feel at home on any game shelf.

The origin of my game — Party On!— dates back a year, to an event run by Studio Cypher, a local game design company in Bloomington, Indiana. Will Emigh, one of its trio of co-founders, began hosting a quarterly game development session to help stimulate the creation and testing of independent games.

“Will wanted to foster the same sort of game development community that we had at Indiana University,” says Ian Pottmeyer, another Studio Cypher co-founder, “when we were there with a bunch of other game designers. Will was also seeing a lot of successful game design groups in places like Seattle and Carnegie Mellon. He wanted to have that kind of close-knit community here in Bloomington.”